An evocative fine
art installation, dedicated to the healing professions, a minyan of ten
chairs within a scrim-paneled chamber provides sanctuary and reflection.
An evocative fine art installation, dedicated to the healing professions,
a minyan of ten chairs within a scrim-paneled chamber provides sanctuary
and reflection.

Multi-Media Installation by Carol Hamoy at the Jewish Museum of FloridaFebruary 28-April
6

One enters the 2007 restoration of the oldest synagogue in Miami Beach, originally
built in 1929, and becomes surrounded by an airy inner-sanctuary of art! PsalmSong
reveals itself as a multi-media, multi-cultural, Jewish feminist, post-modern
sanctuary of fragile translucent fabric. One immediately becomes enchanted
by a creation of visual poetry by artist Carol Hamoy. Its creation took three
years from the first stitch to complete the work. Hamoy's work is hand-made;
which she feel is enormously important in the computer era, in order for the
viewer to feel the hand of the artist.

PsalmSong's sanctuary, constructed of ten woven panels and five unwoven ethereal
panels of white, theatrical scrim in the shape of a pentagon, symbolizes in
shape the power of the number five in numerology to ward off evil. The sanctuary
overwhelms the spectator-participant with its ethereal, pure, and beautiful
metaphysical visual artistry. Inside the sanctuary, ten white-wrapped fragile,
ballroom chairs facing outward in a circle symbolize the minyan, or ten people,
that Judaism prescribes for holding a prayer service. Hamoy's chamber, however,
not only uses Judaism as its seed; but flowers into a universal, multi-cultural
message of healing meditation through the delicacy of feminine artistry and
provides a concrete place for literally spiritually and physically "healing"
through meditation and contemplation.

Hamoy constructed the ten woven panels from tatters of material from family
and friends. The materials are pieces of wedding dresses, baby garments, family
heirlooms, doilies and pieces of lace. They are loosely basted together and
raggedly hand-sewn. Hamoy writes that her mother was a perfect seamstress
and that she was the rebellious first generation immigrant daughter who did
not want to reproduce her mother's life in the inferior position of traditional
of Jewish women as wives and mothers whose lives remained essentially powerless,
inferior and invisible under patriarchy. Influenced by older feminists work
like Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, Hamoy elevates what had been dismissed as
feminine crafts to the level of fine art. She also elevates feminist art from
the earthy and sexual to the mystical power of sublime connection to an invisible,
non-gendered, internal divinity.

All women's' lives and histories fascinate her: the ordinary; famous; and
mythic. She has constructed over 100 life-sized children's dresses made of
paper with photographs of five-year-old girls appearing on the front of each
garment. She delights that all those little girls are now woman who are artists.
She also loves the lives of great women; and an installation of Seven Women
Prophets is housed in the permanent collection of Florida International University
in Boca Raton.

Hamoy's creative impulses arise from her constant thinking about art and
carrying books with her. She never hesitates to find a new inspiration. If
a vision doesn't appear, she reads. Suddenly an unusual construction of women's
lives will rise up in her imagination. The title PsalmSong is illuminated
by the gold-brushed embroidery of ten Psalms which Hamoy translated herself,
based on the ten Psalms whose recitation which 18th century Rabbi Nachman
of Bratslav believed would provide "Tikkun," physical and spiritual
healing, for a "broken world" and for all human suffering.

Unlike Rabbi Nachman's psalms--which were used as they were traditionally
written, as prayers or praises to an external, masculine, objective Jewish
God--Hamoy's psalms lead one to inner reflection, to an non-engendered, invisible
divinity with whom all cultures can identify. The ten panels also allude to
the "tree of life," with its ten spheres of energy, whose contemplation
leads to liberation and enlightenment. Two examples are:

Psalm 42:
As a heart thirsts for water
so my soul cries out for You God.
I walk with the crowd the festive throng,
with joyous shouts of praise.
When I walk in gloom,
I speak to my soul and say,
have hope in God,
praise the Blessed One.

Psalm 77: I cry aloud to the Blessed Beingand hope You hear me in my time
of distress.I call You to mind, I moan, I complain, my spirit has failed.
I speak of what you have done,
Your ways of holiness,
You are the one who
works wonders.No one knows of Your footsteps.ou are the leader of our
people.

The chairs also are embroidered with the names of multi-cultural healers:
midwife, along with shaman, and Curanderas. The most innovative aspect of
this installation is that it is understood not through visual illumination
of its symbols alone but through direct experience of sitting in one of the
chairs and meditating. The sanctuary is not only an astonishing work of art,
but a place where actual healing can take place.

I sat in the chair named "shaman" and meditated on one of the psalms.
As you sit in silence, you can begin to hear sephardic Hebrew singing softly
surrounding you. The power mystical vibrations of the space enter your spirit
with amazing vibrations. I began to feel a mild bliss state with buzzing sounds
in my ears, my heart opening up and streaming out with love. When I stood
up, my vision had changed. I felt surrounded by golden light and the objects
in the room seemed soft, on the verge of dissolving from the visible into
a sense of eternal light. I felt this lightness of being for hours afterward.

On the wall outside the sanctuary, or healer's circle, one finds a hedge
given them by their mothers. Some of the herbal medicines are Dong Quai, a
female tonic; jasmine, which lowers blood pressure; kava kava, which reduces
stress and Valerian, which brings sweet dreams. These herbs reinforce the
fascinating differences among diverse cultures both of the Jews in diaspora
and of alternative healers all over the planet.

Hamoy's personal history, the history of her Jewish ancestors and all of
our ancestors merged in the present moment in this historic building. It became
an historic moment in my life.

As the catalogue notes, this sanctuary symbolizes all the temporary holy
places, constructed from branches, leaves, and the natural environment which
all nomadic people as well as the Jews have constructed historically.

In one of Hamoy's past exhibits, at the Hall of Emigration in New York, were
suspended, empty, wedding dresses, light, airy and elegant, welcoming the
immigrants. Her work has been described as "ghostly" but I disagree.
Ghosts signify the "undead" haunting houses and people and inflicting
pain. Hamoy's airborne garments and airy panels expand one's consciousness
to the transcendent holiness, perfection and oneness of the divine world.
It is a universe animated by spirit and soul, floating with messages of bodymind
healing songs of the self.

PsalmSong unconsciously lifts the spectator-participant's suffering, through
its multi-layered symbols, art forms, and through the primacy of the imagination
or the apparent "real." PsalmSong unconsciously plants a seed of
healing for those who open up to the mysteries of its mystical power.